She's an American teenager, but she's being raised by a pair of undercover Soviet hardcases who apparently grew up on soup made from the ashes of the discarded vinyl shoes that their parents burned to keep warm. Or something like that. Anyway, they never miss an opportunity to drum Paige's responsibilities and duties…

Exactly. If NASA had the means to revisit those planets at will, it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't at least try to rescue the 9 Lazarus explorers who are still unaccounted for (and use a cleaner trajectory to reach Brand's world before Brand herself did).

I think it's more like an Y-shaped wormhole with the arms of the Y terminating at: 1)the Saturn side of the wormhole, 2) the Gargantua side of the wormhole; and 3) the Tesseract in Coop's library. The hub of the Y is Gargantua itself, which would explain why Coop's trip into Gargantua resulted in him running into Anne…

I missed that one, but in at least one space sequence, I heard what I could have sworn was the atonal Monolith sound from 2001.

Are you being sarcastic?

The coda we got was a cheap cop-out, but the coda I wanted (i.e.: the one where she's essentially created to be an immortal robot's immortal mother until the end of time) would have gained more depth in light of his abandonment.

Good point, although the gravitational fluxes seemed to extend way beyond the farm. NASA said they'd been tracking them all over the place (if they were just at the farm, they'd have brought Coop a lot sooner).

The space station that Coop got picked up by was presented as just one of many (or at least one of several) equally massive human communities in space. Meanwhile Anne Hathaway is shown on her new planet in what looks like a relatively small encampment, and alone as far as we can tell.

On their way to Gargantua, midway through the wormhole, Hathaway tells the rest of the crew that the alien space beings have shaken her hand. (It's a throwaway line at the time, no particular reason to remember it).

David was also important to them because (another irony in the film) he had "seen the Makers", who seem to have been elevated to a noble, legendary status that the humans in the movie made it amply clear we don't deserve.

The part about bringing his mother back for only a day was a tear-jerking absurdity, but if the future robots had brought her back forever, then the circle of the movie would have closed in an ironic but (to me, at least) satisfying way: a robot created by humans to satisfy a human's emotional need for attachment…

They mentioned that they had artificial gestation equipment on the ship for the first 10 colonists (and presumably for 10 additional colonists every 9 months after that, or until the adults go insane).

Cornmeal porridge
Corn chips
Corn moonshine
Cornmeal tamales. . .

Coop fell into Gargantua, but then returned to Saturn through the original wormhole. To my mind, this part of the story isn't really a plot hole because Gargantua is almost certainly what's powering the wormhole in the first place. The gravitational energies required to drill a wormhole from one galaxy to another are…

The question, rather, is when was Coop flying from at the end? His trip back happened at exactly the same time as his trip there, which might open up all kinds of other plot holes, but not this one.

They can't. Hathaway's planet (and the Gargantua "system" in general) was reachable only through the artificial wormhole created by future humans. . . which was allowed to collapse as soon as its purpose had been served.

The dust storms were probably caused by massive dehydration and crop failure; or at least, those are the factors that created a strikingly similar phenomenon in America's "Dust Bowl" during the Great Depression.

Now that you mention it, I think there was an allusion to underground cities being built, right at the end of the film. Coop's son refuses to leave the farm (against medical advice) in part because he refuses to "live underground."

It actually is presented as a choice in the movie, but only in passing. When the Coopers first arrive at NASA's facility, they're told that NASA's continued existence is the best-kept secret on the planet, which it has to be because (I'm paraphrasing here from memory), "It's hard to justify spending money on rockets…

I actually didn't bristle at the movie's explanation of why NASA put Coop on the mission. From their point of view, it must have looked like the omnipotent aliens who had sent a wormhole through time and space to save humanity had conjured up the world's last astronaut just in time to help NASA do it.